Tuesday, 29 November 2011

Getting a Drupal site up fast - Drupal 7

You've probably looked at the dozens of videos in this course and said: "whoa! wait a second. I just want to get my site up".
This video gives you only the most bare instructions to get a Drupal site running, and then tells you which other videos to watch for more help.
There are basically three steps.

2nd we'll download and install Core Drupal - that's the Drupal you get from Drupal.org - into that DAMP.

3rd, we'll run Drupal's browser-based installer. And that's it! Then we'll be ready to add content and administer our site.

Now, along the way, I'm going to do this very very quickly, and in fact I have already down-loaded some of these files and un-compressed them. If you have any problems with these steps, see the computer literacy course by Garrick Chow, also on Lynda.com.1: Stack Installer
But - let's get started. Our first stop is at http://acquia.com/downloads Here we get started by looking over here for the platform we're on. Here we're on Windows so I just click "download now" and save it. That'll take a few moments. We then go to our download location which in my case is the desktop, and double click the file that's been downloaded there [which shows as a blue droplet]. Your computer may throw-up a message that warns you about installing a program from the internet. In this case, I know we want to do it so I click "yes".

That launches the Drupal Stack Installer. I'm just going to click through this. You really don't have to change any of the defaults. I'll explain what they are in a later video about installing the Drupal stack installer.

Finally we get to the stage where we're finally going to name our site. We're actually going to replace the version of Drupal that's installed by the Acquia Stack installer, so it doesn't matter what we put here. Still, for consitancy, I'll say

User name is admin, and

Password, as it is throughout this course, is drupal. You of course will use whatever password you prefer. And an email address. And then click next.

You get a confirmation screen, click next again, and then one more time to install the Stack installer. This process will take a few minutes ... and we're done! Click Finish.2: Core Drupal
That launches the control panel for aquia Drupal. So that's our first step completed. Now we want to grab core Drupal, and import it into this stack. To do that, we go back to our web browser, and go to http://drupal.org/project/drupal Scroll down on this page until you get down to the downloads area. Now: I'm making this video before the official release of [Drupal version]7.0 so I'm going to download this one. However, by the time you see it, you'll probably see a 7.0 or a 7.something version of it up here in the green area, and that's the one that you should download.

I click here to download. I've already done it, and the download is on the desktop. So I'll go there, and I'll start the import process.

So there's our Drupal folder after its been un-compressed. If you have any problems with that, watch Garick Chou's videos on computer literacy, also on Lynda.com . I'm going to rename that folder "Two Trees". That goes-along with the name of the site that we'll be building throughout the course, which is about a fictional olive oil company called Two Trees Olive Oil.

Once we've renamed the folder, I go back into my control panel. Go to Settings. And Sites. And Import. (The button opens a file listing of the hard disc). I find that folder (Drupal, renamed Two Trees) and click OK.

Create a new database. I'll call that "Two Trees" as well. And call the server "Two Trees". And click Import.3: Drupal's Browser-based installer
Doing so launches our browser, and starts the third stage of our installation process, by opening Drupal's own installer. Click Save and continue, and continue-on. Again, I will go through all these steps individually in a later video. Finally we add a little bit of information about the site, including the primary - what's called the Super User. I'll call this Two Trees Olive Oil. Put in a little bit of other information. Finally click Save and continue. And that takes us to our completely installed Drupal site. Click on Visit your new site, and we are done!

Now you can start adding content to your new site, changing the design, managing users - basically doing everything it takes to make this site your own.

If you just need a quick and dirty way to get started, see the video Learning Drupal's Basic Workflow. Then, once your site is ready on your laptop or desktop computer, you can move that installation to a server, which you'll learn about from several videos entitled Installing Drupal on a Server.[note: you need to re-start the program from Windows > Start > Acquia Dev Desktop or such each time you re-start your computer.]